How not to “brick” your iPhone

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Listen carefully … the only way you can brick your Australian iPhone is to update the phones’ firmware via iTunes. Now to the story …

I’ve had my unlocked Australian iPhone for over 3 weeks now and the lust hasn’t worn off. I love it ! It’s just so easy to use and so nice to hold.

I really don’t care if Telstra is eventually going to realease an expensive Next G version of the iPhone with terrible battery life and and an outrageous monthly plan that will last longer than the iPhone’s irreplaceable battery. I’m glad I didn’t wait and bought mine on eBay from a guy in Brisbane.

Talk about simplicity. Get a call from an unknown number, when you finish the call, push a button and add it to your address book.

I have never taken so many pictures with a phone. Want to e-mail a picture — easy yet again. Just take the picture, select the e-mail icon, fill in the e-mail address and send it. The picture quality is very acceptable.

SMS is a pleasure as well. The full qwerty keyboard coupled with little coloured speech balloons on the left and right of screen means it’s more of an instant messaging experience rather than vanilla SMS.

It sounds a really obvious work-flow design, but Apple has taken the obvious, the simple and the slick and designed the best user interface in industrial history.

I did of a bit of a search on the Internet looking for something titled: How not to brick your iPhone. Nothing. Maybe it’s obvious to everyone else. It wasn’t to me. Hence this blog post.

I was a bit reluctant to connect it to GPRS (called EDGE in iPhone parlance), using my iSIM (Optus reseller), in case I bricked the iPhone, but I need not have worried.

I was messing around one day and changed the APN name to internet and guess what? The damned thing connected to the Optus GPRS network when it couldn’t get a wireless 802.11 connection. I wasn’t watching at the time it connected.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nine meg of internet download and $30 of pre-paid airtime later, I realized my mistake and turned off GPRS.

It is nice to know that if I really do want to send an e-mail in a hurry, I just have to turn the GPRS back on, and I’m free to do so.

Sometimes it is worth 22 cents flag fall and 15 cents per kbyte to send an e-mail message ! Here’ are iSIM’s data charges.

I was under the impression that you can’t get GPRS connectivity with a pre-paid SIM in Australia. Seems I was wrong !

 

 

I repeat … the only way you can brick your Australian iPhone is to update the phones’ firmware via iTunes.

I installed iTunes on a PC, disconnected the PC from the Internet (just in case), connected the iPhone to the PC and waited to see what would happen.

You guessed it, iTunes asked me if I wanted to update the Iphone hardware. I said no !!!

I also did not select the option that asked me if I wanted to automatically update my Apple hardware’s firmware. It’s that easy …

All the iTunes functionality worked. I loaded a stack of songs on my iPhone without any problems. I haven’t tried videos yet. Maybe next week.

So the bottom line is:

If you don’t want to brick your Australian iPhone do not update the software on the phone using iTunes (or anything else for that matter).

As a precaution, it’s also probably a good idea not to have the PC connected to the Internet if the iPhone is connected to the PC. Just pull the Ethernet cable out of the PC.

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